A Portrait of a Just Man: Andre Dubus’s The Lieutenant

A Portrait of a Just Man: Andre Dubus’s The Lieutenant
Godine (Nonpareil), 2023; 272 pp., $18.95

The Lieutenant offers a time capsule of a world long gone, but with characters asking questions that resonate with us still. Originally published in 1967, Andre Dubus’s first and only novel seems a one-off from his more regular bread-and-butter of short stories and personal essays. A disciple of Chekhov, Dubus decided early in his career to hone his craft by following the model of the Russian master, and his wide range of excellent, finely crafted short stories detail the internal landscape of characters facing the profound brokenness of an American landscape marked by division, isolation, and moral choice. Republished by Godine Nonpareil this year, this novel offers a compelling portrait of the writer Dubus would become, with his later concerns here in germinal form: male vulnerability, the difficulty of making heroic choices, and the quiet grace of love as a salve for the broken soul.

Dubus’s biography sometimes overshadows the remarkable nature of his craft. From his early childhood in Louisiana playing baseball and learning under the Christian Brothers to his time in the Marines, his troubled marriages, and his struggle to provide for an ever-growing family through a teacher’s and writer’s salary, two clear tragedies characterize his work: the rape of his daughter Suzanne in 1980, to which Dubus responded by carrying a gun, ever anxious about his loved ones’ safety, and the accident in 1986 that would leave him paralyzed in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, an event detailed in the title essay for his 1991 collection Broken Vessels.

However, beyond the drama of his life, Dubus remains a writer’s writer, one whose skill with the sentence and ability to plumb the depths of the human heart remains unrivalled. Of his work, many critics have noted the exquisite finesse of his craft as his words move between a careful construction of surfaces and the loaded meanings that gestures and words convey. Note an example from his most anthologized work, “A Father’s Story:” “Then I threw the cigarette and hope both out the window and prayed that he was alive, while beneath that prayer, a reserve deeper in my heart, another one stirred: that if he were dead, they would not get Jennifer.” The carefully wrought union of material and spiritual makes one flick of the wrist convey both action and the movement of Luke Ripley’s soul, while the syntax of the sentence shows the complicated inner conflict motivating the action. As he prays on one level, some deeper substratum fights against that prayer with a firm refusal to yield to some arbitrary concept of the good. That nuanced, lyrical voice articulates the movements in a person’s soul as they face choice. Such moments of decision resound throughout his most beloved works: “If They Knew Yvonne,” “Killings,” “A Winter’s Father,” or “Adultery.”

But before he turned his attention to fathers and the choices they make for their children, Dubus wrote this novel about young men who long to become the kind of men whom others recognize as strong by serving as Marines. The titular lieutenant is Dan Tierney, a newly promoted soldier trying to prove himself while posted on the U.S.S. Vanguard by maintaining a cool hand and keen mind while commanding his unit. Throughout the novel, Dan is deeply aware of his own inadequacies, articulated eloquently in an early passage:

[H]is orders were sometimes questioned. Then he would become uncertain and on some days he would feel that everything he did was wrong, that he was a totally incompetent misfit. By nature he was not a man who exuded strength and dignity (as Captain Scheider was, drunk or sober, laughing or angry) and he knew that. He often cursed himself, told himself that he was nothing but a frisky puppy in a world of serious men and he would never be a general or a colonel if he didn’t learn to maintain the position of his rank and exercise his authority from that fragile height. (12)

The anxieties of this young officer primarily proceed from his own self-consciousness of the fragile height to which he aspires. He loves his soldiers, and he desires to prove himself worthy of their respect. Yet the forces of the novel—a scrawny young recruit named Freeman and the frequent bullying of him by masochistic corpsmen, along with the officers who value protocol and their own authority over the flourishing of those under their care—present the essential test for whether or not Dan will become the man the marines have promised to make him.

The central conflict of the novel concerns how Lieutenant Tierney will handle an incident concerning homosexual activity aboard the carrier. In an age long before the repeal of “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell,” the specter of homosexuality is less about identity or sexuality. Instead, the men within the novel desperately question on what grounds will they be able to prove themselves to the world around them, as the Marines have promised them a home and a family, a place where they can become the image on the recruiting posters that decorated the office where they enlisted. For these young men, adulthood and being a man are slogans and images in which they fervently believe but regularly fall short. As Dan’s investigation is beset by recalcitrant officers, bureaucratic red tape, formal protocol, and scared young men, he must weigh the potential futures of his soldiers in his hands, measuring out justice and mercy in a manner that sharpens him in the process.

The reissue of this novel now, in a world resounding a clarion warning about a “crisis of masculinity,” is salient, for Dubus has regularly resisted the hyper-aggressive machismo of some of his peers. While he highly values male strength and traditional activities and behaviors associated with men, his tenderness and gentleness have been recurring marks of his writing. In an age when young men are turning to media sensations and kickboxers-turned-pundits for advice and mentorship, Dubus’s novel about young men learning to care for others and offer themselves as a sacrifice for them serves as forerunner to the important articulation of a masculine genius in St. John Paul II’s 1989 Redemptoris Custos, an apostolic exhortation on the model St. Joseph provides to all men of faith. In this letter, St. John Paul II urges the faithful to take seriously the service of fatherhood, work as an expression of love, and the deep need for an interior life in any person desiring to be a just man. Dubus’s novel shows immature marines discovering in the circumstances of their own lives the wisdom of this teaching, with some seeing in their command a way to parent soldiers, work toward their good, and build up their inner strength when the world around them fails.

While later stories will surely remain better known than this early novel for the way they distill Dubus’s insight in finely wrought forms, The Lieutenant shows the writer Dubus will become. Utilizing an exclusively masculine environment where men work for respect and seek to be strong, Dubus shows the inner lives of young boys becoming men through sacrifice and love. Against a plot that hangs on violence and injustice, Dubus shows young men desiring justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with each other.